1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method for enabling traditional SCSI peripheral equipment to be compatible with a PLUG-AND-PLAY protocol.
2. Description of the Prior Art
The currently small computer standard interface (SCSI) used is provided as a high speed data transmission interface between a computer and its peripheral equipment such as hard disk drives, printers, and so on. The SCSI is characterized in that up to seven peripheral devices are allowed to be connected to a same SCSI bus, i.e., it provides a suitable expansion capability for a computer system, therefore the SCSI is very popular in this field. Normally, a corresponding identification number is manually assigned to each of the peripheral devices. However, the process of assignment can be cumbersome and may even cause errors if two of the peripheral devices are assigned with the same identification number.
For alleviating the above inconvenience and error, the plug-and-play concept is introduced and performed by providing a plug-and-play SCSI protocol by which a specific identification number (ID number) is assigned to a corresponding one of a plurality of plug-and-play type peripheral devices. This will alleviate the inconvenience of manual assignment to the peripheral devices. However, for conventional peripheral devices, the benefit cannot be applied because they are not plug-and-play type peripheral devices. The difference between the conventional peripheral device and the plug-and-play type peripheral device is that the SCSI controller (chip) of the plug-and-play type peripheral device includes an extra built-in structure which can detect an initial plug-and-play signal and transmit this situation to an SCSI controller of a host computer, which in turn executes an SCSI configured automatic operation (SCAM) so as to assign a specific ID number to each plug-and-play type peripheral device. Since conventional peripheral devices are not installed with the specific structure to detect the initial plug-and-play signal, they cannot inform the SCSI controller when they are initially connected to an SCSI bus. It is requisite to provide a new method by which conventional peripheral devices can be enabled to be compatible with the plug-and-play protocol.